Julie Moreno and her husband, Nef Juarez, tried three separate times to get him legal status in the United States. None of it worked, and last October, Juarez self-deported to Puebla, Mexico, leaving behind the Newark life the couple built together since they met in 2008.
Moreno, a 47-year-old Newark resident and advocate who works with mixed-status families, and Juarez married in 2017 at City Hall in Manhattan, according to New Jersey Monitor. Juarez arrived in the United States in 2000 and entered without authorization, and he had no criminal record, no deportation order, and no prior encounters with ICE. Despite that clean record, the same report notes he was ineligible for a consular appointment, and an inadmissibility bar blocked him from applying for a marriage-based visa even though he was married to a U.S. citizen.
That bar is not a bureaucratic quirk — it is written into federal law. Under Section 212(a)(9)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, noncitizens who rack up a year or more of unlawful presence face an automatic 10-year ban on re-entry if they leave the country, according to USCIS. One possible way around it is an approved Form I-601A provisional waiver proving extreme hardship to a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident spouse or parent, a legal threshold that immigration attorneys describe as steep, per Cohen Tucker Law. According to USCIS, its Immigration and Citizenship Data page tracks I-601A applications by approvals, denials, pending cases, receipts and processing times by quarter and fiscal year to date. USCIS guidance states that a waiver requiring proof of extreme hardship must be denied when the applicant does not meet the statutory requirements.
A Structural Trap for Mixed-Status Families
The math leaves families like Moreno's with an impossible choice: leave the country and face a decade-long ban, or stay and risk arrest. Moreno said she almost had a nervous breakdown after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and the report notes she pointed to Project 2025 as evidence of a shift in enforcement language that made families like hers scared during Trump's second term.
The scale of the shift shows up in the numbers. Immigration judges issued more than 80,000 voluntary departure orders between January 2025 and March 2026, and voluntary departure orders increased 600% compared with the final 15 months of the Biden administration, per the same New Jersey Monitor investigation. The Vera Institute of Justice found monthly voluntary departures topped 9,000 in March 2026 alone, though New Jersey-specific figures are not publicly available and ICE has not provided them.
As an earlier national benchmark, the Department of Justice's FY 2016 Statistics Yearbook reported that 25 percent of immigration judge decisions involved in absentia orders.
Voluntary departure carries its own legal traps. Under Section 240B of the INA, noncitizens granted voluntary departure by an immigration judge may receive up to 120 days to leave at their own expense — but missing that deadline triggers mandatory civil monetary penalties and a 10-year bar on adjusting status or receiving cancellation of removal, according to the Federal Register. More than 70% of people granted voluntary departure under Trump's second term were held in immigration detention while the clock ran, the New Jersey Monitor found.
The Push Toward the App
The Department of Homeland Security has reported that more than 2 million immigrants without legal status have voluntarily self-deported since January 2025, though the Brookings Institution has said DHS's numbers should not be considered a serious source. Administration officials separately claimed more than 100,000 people used a federal app to self-deport, but DHS has not released data substantiating that app-use claim. The Atlantic and ProPublica found the verifiable count of app-assisted departures was in the tens of thousands.
The financial incentive behind that push is deliberate. DHS cost calculations published in January 2026 estimated that processing a voluntary self-deportation through the CBP Home app costs taxpayers $5,100 per person, compared with $18,245 for a formal government-enforced deportation, as Hoodline previously reported. The United States offers $2,600 and a free flight to people here illegally who agree to self-deport under the resulting program, known as Project Homecoming. Homeland Security officials have said being in detention is a choice, while a Homeland Security spokesperson said people who do not self-deport will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.
Detainees Pressured Inside Delaney Hall
Some of that pressure plays out inside Newark's Delaney Hall, the migrant jail that reopened in the city in 2025. Rep. Rob Menendez, who co-sponsors the American Families United Act and visits Delaney Hall detainees, said some detainees are forced to sign self-deportation orders without understanding them, per the New Jersey Monitor's reporting.
ICE was awarded a 15-year contract worth roughly $1 billion in February 2025 to reopen and run the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall facility, generating more than $60 million in initial annualized revenue for operator The GEO Group, according to The GEO Group. The facility had previously operated as an ICE site from 2011 to 2017 before sitting vacant. Federal officials have also weighed repurposing Fort Dix to add 3,000 beds to New Jersey's enforcement infrastructure, though that plan has not happened.
Delaney Hall's capacity expansion has run alongside repeated legal fights. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in July 2025 that New Jersey's 2021 law banning private immigration detention contracts, Assembly Bill 5207, was unconstitutional under the Supremacy Clause, according to Courthouse News Service. New Jersey later sued The GEO Group in Essex County Superior Court after the company denied state health inspectors full access to Delaney Hall following reports of contaminated water, poor medical care, and detainee hunger strikes. And this month, a federal judge upheld Gov. Mikie Sherrill's executive order barring federal immigration agents without judicial warrants from using nonpublic state property as staging grounds, per New Jersey Monitor reporting carried by Truthout.
A Stalled Fix in Congress
The American Families United Act is in Congress and includes a case-by-case waiver process, according to legislative records. The bill has not advanced. American Families United, which represents U.S. citizens in mixed-status marriages, says the households it represents number 1.5 million.
For Moreno and Juarez, the legislative stalemate has already reshaped their marriage. She visited him in Mexico in March for a family wedding. Moreno plans to relocate to Mexico herself after her nephew graduates high school, joining what the New Jersey Monitor describes as a growing number of American Families United households now making plans to leave the United States altogether.
